Portable electronic devices such as smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous in many people's lives. These devices typically incorporate a screen or visual display as an integral part of the user interface. In many situations, users will find themselves holding the phone in, or viewing the phone from, a position that makes it difficult or inconvenient to glean information from the displayed text or image. Consequently it may be highly desirable to rotate the display image, for instance from portrait to landscape orientation, to mitigate this issue and facilitate reading or interpretation of such a display image by the user.
Some available methods utilize accelerometer data to determine a change in orientation of the display. For example when the change in orientation of the device as measured by the accelerometer exceeds a certain threshold, the display image orientation may be rotated (for instance from portrait to landscape orientation or vice versa). In some available systems, accelerometer data is processed continuously whenever the display is in use, regardless of the state of motion of the device.